Renaissance

Commentary

Brunelleschi. The father of Renaissance?

Brunelleschi's use of perspective certainly seems to have set him apart from his classical predecessors. It is one thing to imagine the volumes and forms of a structure, quite another to visualize the human experience of those forms at full scale.

It's fascinating to imagine the logical leaps undertaken by these individuals, leaps that, at the time, were unprecedented. Through centuries of familiarity, we now hold them as basic tenants of our understanding of the visual world. It's refreshing to be reminded that this was not always so.

From the American Institute of Architect online: http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek08/0328/0328p_duomo.cfm

The perspective machine Any survivor of architecture school should remember drawing class and establishing the vanishing point when drawing in perspective. Converging parallel lines in a drawing give it the illusion of depth and distance. Although the principle of the vanishing point was known to the Greeks and Romans, as was much other technology, that knowledge had been lost over the years. Brunelleschi is known as the person who rediscovered the principles of perspective drawing. These are the same principles that architects employ today in architecture school. To demonstrate the effect of drawing in perspective, Filippo painted the Baptistery of San Giovanni from about six feet inside the center door of Santa Maria del Fiore. The painting included everything that could be seen from his positioned location. Instead of painting the sky, he affixed a plate of polished silver. He carved a peephole in the painted panel at the perspective vanishing point. Standing at the same location where he painted the view, he demonstrated the accuracy of perspective drawing by holding the painted panel facing away, with the panel held up to his eye to peer through the hole. With his other hand he held a mirror at arms length in front of and facing the painting so that he was looking directly into the mirror at the reflection of the painting. The view through the hole into the mirror revealed the painting, drawn in perfect perspective, in the place where the subject of the painting would be viewed. The polished silver plate reflected the actual sky complete with drifting clouds. The view was so realistic that the viewer could not tell the difference between the painted scene and the actual image of the building’s shape and proportion. It is interesting that Brunelleschi was not content to simply paint in perspective; he was compelled to demonstrate mathematically that the view was visually correct. It is a testament to his drive and desire to understand precisely how things worked or could work. It is an attribute of high intelligence.

Brunelleschi certainly does introduce a clear sense of visual order and perspective to his architecture - however we should not overlook the (often arcane and esoteric) use of mathematics and geometry which the master masons of the medieval period brought to bear in the contruction of their buildings. As we acknowledged in pervious units, many of the great medieval cathedrals of Europe possess intricate and subtle harmonies of ratio and geometry (Durham cathedral is a prime exampls of this). However Brunelleschi does seem to display an awareness of visual geomenry which is not necessarily shared by the masons of the Gothic era: as we can see from the photos above, his buildings seem to be very strongly orientated around specific viewpoints or perspectives, so that the viewer becomes inescapably aware of the reslotute progression of forms and volumes (i.e. columns, capitals, entablatures, etc.) as they march off toward the distant 'vanishing point' on the horizon... This is not surprising: we must remember that Brunelleschi was himself instrumantal in introducing and codifying the laws of visual perspective during the early decades of the fifteenth century - and that he often made verey effective use of architectural views and vistas in his famous public demonstrations of the new Renaissance 'science' of perspective.